The U.S. government has known for 16 years the Duka family, including Fort Dix Six brothers —Dritan, Eljvir and Shain—were in the country illegally. It’s believed the family unlawfully slipped into the U.S. in 1984 by crossing from Mexico at Brownsville, Texas.

In 1989, Ferik Duka filed a claim for asylum with U.S. immigration authorities, but the application for the family languished inside the federal bureaucracy due to a paperwork “backlog”.

While the asylum application was under consideration, the government effectively suspended any effort to deport family members as illegal aliens, the source familiar with their immigration history said.

Then two years ago, federal immigration officials recommended an investigation by the FBI and Homeland Security agents into possible immigration fraud by the Dukas.

The former INS bureaucracy had been transferred from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security, where officials were under pressure from Congress and the public to eliminate immigration backlogs and crack down on aliens who had entered the United States illegally.

By late 2005, Homeland Security looked “at the Dukas’s suspicious file and notified both the new Homeland investigations bureau, known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and the FBI.”.

Before a thorough immigration fraud investigation could be conducted, however, the Philadelphia-area Joint Terrorism Task Force, responding to a tip-off from a Circuit City clerk who was disturbed at the contents of a video a customer wanted to have copied, launched the undercover terrorism investigation which last week resulted in the arrests of three Duka brothers and three other men on charges of plotting to attack Fort Dix and other targets in the New Jersey area.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said that government oversights like the ones that evidently plagued the Duka case are “par for the course” in what he called “our don’t ask, don’t tell immigration system. We make it as easy as possible for illegal aliens to live here. 'No' never means 'no'.”